Woody Guthrie. 1943 (courtesy Rounder Records)

Burlington, MA – Rounder Records, in conjunction with The Woody Guthrie Archives, will inaugurate the new Woody Guthrie Legacy Series with a 4-CD boxed set, My Dusty Road on August 25. The original metal masters for these songs, recorded in the mid 1940s by Herbert Harris and Moses Asch, had languished for years in the Brooklyn basement of an elderly woman, stacked in cardboard barrels. Reissue co-producer Michael Creamer, who had learned of the cache from his cousin, took a few of the discs to the renowned mastering engineer Doug Pomeroy. The clarity and presence of the sound was revelatory. When Guthrie’s daughter Nora heard them for the first time she said “Wow! Just the fact that I could hear the music so clearly was ‘wow’ enough! But then, this soft flow of old feelings followed, as I heard my father’s voice start to fill the room and I absolutely remembered it, and then he was right there with me…These recordings are treasures.” Documentary film producer Peter Frumkin who has used six of these recordings in the American Masters production of Woody Guthrie: Ain’t Got No Home said “Hear these recordings for the first time and your jaw will drop, the sound is so clean and crisp that you’ll hear the songs in ways you never have before. The only way to hear them any cleaner would be to have been sitting in the studio 60 years ago.”

The boxed set includes 54 songs on 4 compact discs, including 6 previously unreleased tracks as well as Guthrie’s “hits” such as “This Land is Your Land,” “Going Down the Road (I Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way),” “Talking Sailor,” “Hard Travelin,” “The Sinking Of The Reuben James”and “Pretty Boy Floyd,” to name a few.

In preparing the package and accompanying 68-page full color book, written by Guthrie historian Ed Cray and Rounder’s Bill Nowlin, Rounder worked closely with The Woody Guthrie Archives, which contributed several previously unpublished photos, as well as artwork and illuminated lyric sheets by Guthrie himself. Also included are facsimiles of Woody’s business card, a postcard sent from Florida to his wife, and a booking card from the 1940s. The entire package, with thematically-organized discs in separate sleeves, comes in a durable replica of a 1940s-style vintage suitcase, complete with handles and latches. This is not just a CD boxed set but rather an essential piece of American history – not to be missed!

Disc One: Woody’s “Greatest” Hits

All the songs on these four discs were recorded on April 16, 19, 20, 24, and 25, 1944, plus an unreported later date that month, in the cramped New York City studio of Asch Records. Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston were between merchant marine voyages; their friend, blind Sonny Terry, was living on a meager Social Security check and what he could pick up playing harmonica around town. Over those five days, they recorded approximately 250 tracks, some songs with multiple takes. Those discs were apparently divided equally between partners Moe Asch and Herbert Harris, when they dissolved the company. Asch would make extensive use of his 125 tracks when he launched Folkways Records. Harris later issued a handful of his cache on his Stinson label.

Disc 1 Track Listing

1. This Land is Your Land
2. I Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way
3. Talking Sailor
4. Philadelphia Lawyer
5. Hard Travelin’
6. Jesus Christ
7. The Sinking of the Reuben James
8. Pretty Boy Floyd
9. Grand Coulee Dam
10. Nine Hundred Miles
11. I Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way
12. My Daddy
13. Bad Repetation **

Disc Two: Woody’s Roots

In the face of so many, many songs and ballads Guthrie wrote – estimates range from 1200 to 1500 and higher – it is easy to forget that he was also a folk singer, that he learned traditional songs aurally most of his life. Steeped in the so-called “roots music” of the Southwest, Guthrie infused those qualities in much of what he wrote later, and thus assured the success of songs such as those on Disc I.

Guthrie learned some songs and stories from his mother, from Uncle Jeff Guthrie, from his father who regularly sang in the church choir, from the man who shined shoes at Jigg’s barbershop in Pampa. Later he picked up fiddle tunes from his best friend, Matt Jennings, and from the pickup square dance bands he played with around Pampa and Amarillo, Texas. He learned songs from 78 rpm records and over the radio, many of them traditional songs reworked, if at all, to secure a copyright, songs by the Carter Family, by Vernon Dalhart, by Fiddlin’ John Carson, and half a hundred others. He learned songs from traveling medicine shows and touring country bands. All of these he fused in a style uniquely his own. As a youngster in Okemah, Oklahoma, a young man in Pampa, Texas, even as an adult playing with his good friend Huddie Ledbetter in New York City or listening to Library of Congress field records at Alan Lomax’s insistence in Washington, Guthrie absorbed an uniquely American tradition.

Disc 2 Track Listing

1. Poor Boy
2. Worried Man Blues
3. A Picture From Life’s Other Side
4. Buffalo Skinners
5. Hard Ain’t It Hard
6. Stewball
7. Stackolee
8. Gypsy Davy
9. Little Darling Pal of Mine
10. What Did the Deep Sea Say?
11. Chisholm Trail
12. Put My Little Shoes Away
13. Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?
14. John Henry

Disc Three: Woody the Agitator

In New York City, Guthrie fell in, or was snatched up by The Almanac Singers, an ever-shifting amalgamation of pro-Union, anti-Jim Crow singers. The central figures were a lanky five-string banjo player, Pete Seeger; a portly, folksy Arkansan who sang bass, Lee Hays; and Millard Lampell, a facile and clever songwriter who tended to sing the melody line. For the last ten years, they had seen “oppressed people and therefore oppressors,” as Hays argued; now they lifted their voices in protest and defiance.

Disc 3 Track Listing

1. I’m Gonna Join That One Big Union
2. Hangknot, Slipknot
3. Gonna Roll the Union On
4. The Ludlow Massacre
5. Sally Don’t You Grieve
6. Harriet Tubman’s Ballad, part 1
7. Harriet Tubman’s Ballad, part 2
8. Tear the Fascists Down**
9. When The Yanks Go Marching In
10. You Can Hear My Whistle Blow**
11. Union Burying Ground
12. You Gotta Go Down and Join the Union

Disc Four: Woody, Cisco and Sonny Jam the Blues, Hollers, and Dances

After their second voyage in the merchant marine, Guthrie persuaded Moses Asch to record as many songs as he could get down on the scarce aluminum masters. Asch was taking a big gamble based on a hunch; Guthrie was important as a songwriter, and Guthrie would sell enough records to make the gamble worthwhile.

Guthrie, being Guthrie, offhandedly invited his shipmate, Gilbert “Cisco” Houston, and Sanders “Blind Sonny” Terry to join him in what would be an impromptu jam session in the Asch studio during the last weeks of April, 1944. On many tracks, Terry, a true virtuoso on the harmonica, shone brightly. As Guthrie later wrote:

Sonny Terry blew and whipped, beat, fanned and petted his harmonica, cooed to it like a weed hill turtle dove, cried to it like some worried woman come to ease his worried mind…. He put the tobacco sheds of North and South Carolina in it and all of the blistered and hurt and hardened hands cheated and left empty, hurt and left crying, robbed and left hungry, pilfered and left starving, beaten and left dreaming. He rolled down the trains that the colored cannot drive, only clean and wash down. He blew into the wood holes and the brassy reeds the tale and the wails of Lost John running away from the dogs of the chain gang guards, and the chain gang is the landlord that is never around anywhere. (American Folksong [New York: Oak Publications, 1961], p. 7.)

Disc 4 Track Listing

1. Train Breakdown
2. Do You Ever Think Of Me? (aka At My Window)
3. Guitar Rag**
4. Square Dance Medley (Cripple Creek, Buffalo Gals, Old Joe Clark, Red Wing, Ida Red, Chilly Winds, Sandy Land)
5. Guitar Breakdown
6. Raincrow Bill
7. Ain’t Nobody’s Business
8. Stepstone
9. Ezekiel Saw the Wheel
10. Bile Them Cabbage Down
11. Danville Girl
12. Guitar Blues
13. Brown’s Ferry Blues**
14. More Pretty Girls Than One
15. Sonny’s Flight **

A Note From Nora Guthrie:

“I remember first hearing these recordings about two years ago. Michael Creamer called and told me the incredible story of their discovery – in Brooklyn no less! Well, my curiosity was awfully peaked and I couldn’t wait to have a listen.

My first impression was… Wow! Just the fact that I could hear the music so clearly was ‘wow’ enough! But then, this soft flow of old feelings followed, as I heard my father’s voice start to fill the room and I absolutely remembered it, and then he was right there with me. Wow. And then I heard and remembered Cisco, and Sonny, as if they were sitting right there on the orange couch in our living room. I’m sitting there too, watching old friends comfortably watching each other, easily playing along together. There they are. Wow.

These recordings are treasures. To sit and listen, is to sit with Woody and his crew. And you become a part of that crew, and you hear how they listen to each other’s voices, how they lean in to connect their rhythms and harmonies. It’s achingly human, simple and direct yet full of spirited words and ideas. You can hear so much; the man, his friends, his words, his times, his passions, his angers, his family, his government, his home, his road.

It’s very, very strange. The more time goes by, the clearer Woody’s voice gets.” Nora Guthrie

– from Rounder Records